The Abandoned Barekese Hospital - Part 1

The videoclip was dispatched to me via the platform of my Asante-Juaben elder relative by the name of Asonaba Said Kwasi Adu, a professionally trained doctor of homeopathy, and it is narrated by M C Ishmael. The subject of the videoclip is one that is patently pedestrian and nauseatingly Ghanaian in both rampancy and its perennially routine and cyclically obtuse and scandalously verging on primitive bestiality and politically and ideologically self-defeating, if also because it rancidly reeks of the sort of chuckleheaded and mischief-making game of musical chairs of the kind that most of Ghanaian-born and raised adults of this author’s age, that is, the children and the youths of the 1960s and the 1970s grew up playing on moonlit nights. Which means that it has been with us for as long as any of us can remember in the post-independence or the postcolonial era.

This harebrained or chuckleheaded political game of musical chairs that we are talking about presently is better known as “The Abandoned Taxpayer-Funded Projects of and by Successive Ghanaian Governments,” going as far back as approximately 70 years and, perhaps, even a little well before. But here, too, like all things politically Ghanaian, there is enough of the proverbial blame to go all the way around over and over again. Which is also what makes this retchingly or convulsively tired problem all the more hopelessly pointless for any serious-minded adult Ghanaian citizen to attempt to broach or pry. It is virtually synonymous with the equally tired maxim of “flogging a dead horse.”

Which is also why left to the present author alone, he would much prefer to be deliberating on a relatively more significant issue, such as the recent rather criminally grotesque announcement by Ghana’s Minister of Education, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, that the ragtag government of the term-hogging President John “Payola-Incontinent” Dramani Mahama was avidly and desperately looking to hire at least 50,000 - Yes, Dear Reader, you got the latter figure correctly - teachers to fill up the gaping vacancies created by the extreme difficulty that the Education Ministry was presently having in recruiting and hiring new professionally trained teachers.

You see, when I decided to share this meaty grist of good news with some of my friends and colleagues right here in The Big Apple of New York City, some of them could simply not help but fall completely flat on their prats and bellies. The logical response was, naturally, as follows: “How many of the country’s already actively engaged professionally trained teachers in the system got fully paid their well-deserved salaries over the past six months?”

Sometimes, one wonders whether ours is a country that is rancidly and turgidly inflated to capacity with intestinal gas, bursting at the seams, and literally about to explode with a deafening decibel not half of which was heard or reverberated during the recent two-week relentless bombardments of the the Holy Islamic Democratic Republic of Iran. But, of course, on the critical and the throes-of-death subject of Ghana’s public education, especially regarding the insufferable stench of the same, we need a much bigger width and breadth as well as length and breadth of temporal space, as many of us learned way back in grade or elementary school, to broach and adequately tackle this conundrum.

So, of course, we are presently obligated to turn round and, at least for the nonce, focus squarely on what inspired our present tete-a-tete, in Macronian parlance. Which concerns the decision by the twice, nonconsecutively, elected government of the eternally perambulating President John “I Sincerely Have Absolutely No Fancy for American-Made Automobiles” Dramani Mahama to continue with some of the so-called Agenda-One-Hundred-And-Eleven (or Agenda-111) construction of the Health and Hospital Centers that were left behind uncompleted by the previous two-term New Patriotic Party-sponsored government of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

Now, we need to humbly tread cautiously in view of the fact that the previous Akufo-Addo regime also played this criminally myopic game of Self-Serving National Development Agenda whereby, in the memorably wicked words of the late President John Evans “Atta-Woyome” Mills - My Dear Good, Old Uncle Tarkwa-Atta, that is - taking up and politically responsibly and, some would even say, patriotically, completing some of the uncompleted national-development projects, got cynically tagged as “Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor’s Asante Projects,” that is, taxpayer-underwritten nonpartisan and general-purpose national development projects initiated by the then recently exited New Patriotic Party-sponsored and the now 87-year-old former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-led government. The imperiously self-absorbed then newly elected native of Fante-Ekumfi-Narkwa, in the Central Region, would smugly and pontifically declare these Agyekum-Kufuor-initiated projects to be completely out-of-bounds, such criminally wasteful management of the hard-earned Ghanaian taxpayer money notwithstanding.

Very likely, the deliberately and the studiously, if also morally unconscionably, abandoned and/or purposely ignored Asante-Barekese General Hospital, in the North-Atwima District of the Asante Region, who geographical location also happens to be one of the ancestral moorings of Yours Truly, also belongs to the “No-Go” category of the National Development Projects politically vindictively dubbed or classified as “Kufuor’s Asante Projects.” The decision by the present administratively wobbly regime of President Mahama, a former Arch-Lieutenant of the late President John Evans “Atta-Woyome” Mills, to be unabashedly certain, tells us more about the characteristically criminally vindictive temperament of the entire “swollen-shoot” infected and Gay-Bashing leadership of the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-fangled kleptocratic juggernaut that is the National Democratic Congress (NDC). Is Ghana really so hopelessly beyond salvation and redemption, as despondently suggested by many of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances? I definitely hope not!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

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